The Linux install is now complete and you will now be able to use the adapter. Note that you should check your serial number on the adapter to ensure that it will work on the operating system. Also note that there are two types of UC-232A adapters so check again what you have when installing the driver. The Aten USB to Serial Driver (UC232A / UC232A1) Install is added below.
To get the USB adapter to work with Linux I initially used my Slackware 8.0 box with kernel 2.4.8. Today I am using 2.4.13 and it's still working fine. You need at least a 2.4.6 kernel. The driver for this RS232 serial line to USB converter is fairly new and was introduced with the 2.4.6 kernel.
usb serial controller driver model uc-232a
This article describes the procedure for downloading and installing version 2.0.2.1 of the Bridgemate Pro server USB-to-serial converter (dongle) for 32-bit versions of Microsoft Windows. In case you experience connection problems with the Bridgemate Pro server, it is recommended the driver be updated.
Version 2.0.2.1 of the Aten USB-serial converter driver has been tested successfully on 32-bit version of Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. Version 3.7 and 3.8 of the Aten driver cd-rom contain this version of the driver (the version number of the cd-rom is written on the cd-rom itself). Previous driver cd-roms and driver files downloaded from the internet possibly contain older versions of the driver and applying these drivers may result in problems during use. Possible symptoms are:
Just to confirm the pi is connected to my APC SmartUPS 3000XL via a RS232 (9 pin) serial cable (Part No: 940-0024) which is connected to a RS232 to USB serial adaptor. The output above seems to confirm that the RS232 to USB serial adaptor is detected by the pi but that the UPS is not communicating it seems? Could this be because the serial adaptor (although detected) does not have the necessary driver installed on the pi?
On the NI RIO hardware runs Linux. NI VISA on Linux claims all USB devices without an installed OS driver for itself and makes them available as USB Raw device. Only that is in 99% of the cases pretty useless as operating on USB Raw level requires you to implement the low level USB driver yourself on top of NI VISA. While not impossible even for a virtual serial device it is a lot of nitty gritty low level work and for some devices it is not enough since NI VISA USB Raw does not support all USB transfer modes such as isochronous transport that is sometimes used for high speed devices and only a limited form of interrupt transfers.
The ATEN pl2303 (uc 232a serial port) USB\VID Code consists of a few parts that is relative to the hardware. The "USB\VID _" is the first part of the number that relates to the manufacturer, ATEN has the USB\VID code of USB\VID_0557. The individual part identification code for this device is the "&PID_" number, in this case it is Pl2303 (UC 232A Serial Port) PID_2008 which is a Pl2303 (UC 232A Serial Port) device. If the usb device is not working or seems very slow then it is likely that the driver is not installed correctly, old or broken. Designed specifically to be used with the ATEN Pl2303 (UC 232A Serial Port) device, the list of free downloads below is the most up-to-date drivers that we hold on record for the ATEN Pl2303 (UC 232A Serial Port) device.
Oracle Solaris supports Digi InsideOut Networks' devices and recently, KeySpan and Prolific chipset based devices' support were also integrated to Oracle Solaris. Keyspan and Prolific USB serial drivers are available in Oracle Solaris 11 and in Oracle Solaris 10 Update 2 and later. PL2303 chip based adapters and Keyspan USA-19HS adapter are available as part of Oracle Solaris 10 Update 2. Keyspan USA-49WLC adapter is supported in Oracle Solaris 11 and in Oracle Solaris 10 update 3 and later releases.
Keyspan and Prolific USB serial drivers are available in Oracle Solaris 11 and in Oracle Solaris 10 Update 2 and later. PL2303 chip based adapters and Keyspan USA-19HS adapter are supported. Keyspan USA-49WLC adapter is supported in Oracle Solaris 10 Update 3 and Oracle Solaris 11. Prolific PL2303HX (Chip Rev D) is supported in Oracle Solaris 10 Update 4 and Oracle Solaris 11.
There are many usb-to-serial devices in the market that are based on Prolific chipsets. The Oracle Solaris usbsprl(7D) driver supports three kinds of Prolific chip sets: PL2303H, PL2303HX and PL2303X. These devices might have different vendor ids or product ids, for example, the ids of ATEN's UC-232A USB-to-serial (557,2008) are different with the ones from Prolific (67b,2303). For unknown devices, if they don't work by just plugging to the box, there is a way to determine if they could work with usbsprl driver. Plug the device and find out the vendor/product ids by looking for "usb" and the device related strings in the output of prtconf(1M):
in some ways it's worse than you think, the order devices are detected in when they are all plugged in at power up is partially determined by how fast each driver is initialized, a major speed change in a driver could change the order.the thing you need to remember about USB is that is was initially designed for cheap, low-end, low speed devices like keyboards. Electrically it is a _very_ simple design.you have four wirespowerclockdatagroundthe signaling over the data and clock wires is also pretty primitive (it's basically the i2c bus with a little more definition over the data standard)all that a non-powered USB hub consists of is multiple sockets wired together (NO active electronics at all)a powered hub is only required to add a power supply to this.(now frequently hubs do add a bit more logic so that they can respond to queries from devices to answer how much power they can provide, but that's not a requirement of the USB 1.0 spec)as for the funny connector, it was designed primarily to be cheap, then to be durable. it was copied from one of the popular console game systems that used it for the joysticks. They then made the ends of the cable different to make it impossible to plug things in incorrectly (and then people didn't like the size of the connector, so they made a different one, and a different one,.....)over time things have gotten faster (by a factor of 100 or so), but everything is still backwards compatible so that you can take the oldest USB device and plug it into the newest system and things will work (everything on the bus will slow down to the speed of the slowest device on the bus, but it will function). USB was designed to be _extremely_ forgiving for slow or extremely low capability devicesdevice identification on USB is supposed by be done by a unique identifier in each device, but as USB interfaces have gotten cheaper (and moved from needing several chips, including separate rom/ram chips to being a tiny section of built-in logic 'thrown in' on a $5 chip in addition to the main functionality) the process and capability to give each device a unique serial number has fallen by the wayside (and/or cheap, short-sighted manufacturers have opted to shave pennies off their costs by not bothering to program the serial numbers on the devices) and the result is that sometimes there is no theoretical way to tell two devices apart once you are talking to them (you have to depend on what bus are they plugged into, which falls apart with hubs, at which point the only thing you can do is to depend on what order they were plugged in)USB today is doing things never imagined by the designers, and in fact doing things that if you had asked the designers, they would have told you were explicitly _not_ in the world of things they designed USB for (due to the cost of implementing the interface with the technology of the time). For a lot of things that USB is being used for today, their answer would have been "use FireWire, it's designed for that sort of performance" (Log in to post comments) User-friendly disk names Posted Jun 25, 2011 1:22 UTC (Sat) by mikov (guest, #33179) [Link]
In our case, we are using several USB to serial converters plugged into a couple of hubs. They are supposed to be the same, so it is not the manufacturers fault that they are indistinguishable by anything other than their physical connection. Unfortunately there is no reasonably priced alternative to USB,A single multi-port USB to serial converter would address this nicely, but we have evaluated about a dozen of them, and while all they work perfectly in Windows, they are either unsupported in Linux at all, or horribly broken (like dropping a byte every couple of hours). It is an embarrassing shame. I wish our company had the resources to sponsor somebody to fix that. The only multi-port converter that worked well (other than not having its "non-free" firmware in Debian), and was reasonably cheap and available in the USA, was an old Keyspan 4-port model, which is no longer manufactured... User-friendly disk names Posted Jun 25, 2011 3:44 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]
Do they _really_ work perfectly in Windows? In my experience, cheap serial converters are prone to dropping a byte now and then, and when I searched online it turned out that it was hardware not drivers -- Windows users would experience the same problem given the same level of usage and attention to detail (it just happens a lot less often, because there are more of us Linux developers making heavy use of serial ports). Sorry I can't find an actual reference explaining the hardware issue on a common PLX usb-serial chip; there is no sufficient replacement yet for the recently-discontinued Google Linux search :`-(I agree that keyspan did not have these problems, but they were significantly more expensive and seem to have lost out to the even cheaper but somewhat flaky adapters...If there are current multi-port adapters that really do have higher quality chips in them (i.e. like keyspan rather than PLX) but lack Linux drivers, then somebody should get in touch with the Linux Driver Project and donate such an adapter! USB Serial port woes Posted Jun 27, 2011 3:34 UTC (Mon) by mikov (guest, #33179) [Link] 2ff7e9595c
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